Marriage Matters: Today is so yesterday

We are celebrating today’s rodent holiday with a viewing this evening of the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.”

By James and Audora Burg

We are celebrating today’s rodent holiday with a viewing this evening of the 1993 movie “Groundhog Day.”

In the quirky and ultimately profound film, Bill Murray’s character awakens the morning after a disastrous Groundhog Day to find that somehow, it is “yesterday” morning. It is still Groundhog Day, and the misery of the day he has already experienced smacks him as he lives through it again.

And again and again and again, until he ultimately undergoes personal growth and transformation, which frees him to move forward in the time stream.

The movie was driven by conflict centering on the fact that at the beginning, Murray’s character is an obnoxious lout, and the looping day in question was an awful, terrible, no good day. But what if his repeatedly-repeating day had been one of his happier ones?

Although that would not provide enough conflict to drive plot points for a movie, it can be entertaining to consider such a thing happening in one’s own life.

We have thought about the idea, in that “what if” fashion that kids traffic in: “What if you had a million dollars?” “What if the van were a Ferrari?” “What if you could go to Mars?”

So, giving it a try here: If we could stay anchored in the same day, which day would we choose?

When we overly-practical grown-ups manage to slip the bounds of rationality and entertain such a fantasy, our wishes do not go to the big-deal, red-letter days in our lives, like our re-meeting, engagement or wedding days, but to the best of the ordinary days.

In fact, the most appealing answer always involves piecing together blissful moments from several different days, kind of like a personal highlights reel: The day where we had the opportunity to sleep in – and then were actually able to stay asleep.

The perfect-wind day when we took out our old catamaran, and there were few other boats on the lake to impede our flight-path across the lake. That amazing dinner we had in Florida, where Audora’s scallops were so tasty and Jim’s steak was cooked to perfection.

In other words, our ideal day is one that we have never experienced in total. This makes the fantasy what-if doubly unrealistic.

But many couples suffer from the impression that what they should be expecting in marriage is the fantasy day, and when they actually have something that is closer to the grittiness of the movie Groundhog Day, they believe that something is terribly wrong with their marriage.

Can we learn to embrace the groundhogness of life, that is, to celebrate the normal, the routine, and the expected? If so, we may find it a gift rather than drudgery to be able to re-live such days.

James Burg, Ph.D., is an associate professor at Indiana University-Purdue, Fort Wayne. His wife, Audora, is a freelance writer. You may contact them at marriage@charter.net